Claventino
by Resonance
Summary: Hugh Claventino leaves his ancestral home for Hogwarts School of Witchcraft & Wizardry. RPG Background - Prelude Story.


CLAVENTINO  
  
[All characters are copyright R.J.Scott 2003, world and elements of it are part of the Harry Potter universe and not owned by me. Hugh Claventino leaves his ancestral home for Hogwarts School of Witchcraft & Wizardry. RPG Background - Prelude Story.]  
  
A ghostly choir echoes through the pitch black, as if the darkness itself was a corridor. A column of white and blue smoke twists and shakes its way through Claventino like a disembodied serpent, carrying along a small young boy in its wake. He drifts inches from an unseen floor, his eyes shut, his breathing shallow. His skin is deathly cold.  
  
Crystals of ice glistens on the young boy's forehead as he floats into brilliant daylight, shaking his heels free of the long whispy fingers of smoke. His face is fresh and unblemished like that of a baby, with dark round eyes, a cherub-like nose and thin pink lips. His head is shaved, and the definition of his jaw striking. He would have appeared a vision of innocence, if not for the severity of his expression, the way in which the dark pools of his eyes often narrow, his brow hardens and the thin lips draw into a grim line.  
  
He taps his feet along the warm marble floor of the corridor, passing under the crafted arches and stopping outside a hammered brass door that hums and vibrates softly. The boy leans forward and plants a dry kiss on the gibbous moon at the door's centre.  
  
The door cracks open and admits him into a room full of warped shapes and walls. It is a room full of mirrors, and within lurks the shattered pysche of November Claventino. Not a muscle twitches in the boy's face - he sees that the twisted shapes are faces, and as he enters every single one moves and pulses. They all open their mouths, and then the room is filled with the most horrifying choir of voices. All of them are the same voice, but each one stretched and distorted with different emotion.  
  
Screams, soft words, mad ranting, joyous singing and acid critique assaulting from all sides. It would have been enough to drive a lesser heart from the room, but the young boy simply hovered, his face hard. He picked out an image from the churning mass of lips and eyes, and focused upon their words.  
  
"It's HIM!"  
  
"Safe! Safe! I thought..."  
  
"I still remember! You've made me so angry!"  
  
"Always hers, never mine... hers hers hers"  
  
"My son..."  
  
"Your sister left us, now..."  
  
"Do you remember..."  
  
"It's the MUGGLE BLOOD that does it..."  
  
"Let me hold you..."  
  
"Why, why, why? I always told you..."  
  
They are lost in their own dialogues, their eyes lifted to far off visions, bowed in reminisces or creased in furious tirades. Turning around the room, the boy finds one mirror that does not speak, but has its eyes firmly focused upon him. He moves toward it, and reaches out a hand.  
  
November Claventino gazes lovingly at his son, and the oily spectre of his face begins to draw itself into order. The boy feels his flesh tingle, and a hand envelops it. For a moment, his face opens and is filled with longing hope. Then, the sensation fades, and he is left, hand outstretched, looking at the warped visage of his father in the glass plane.   
  
Music floats as always from his mother's chamber. A muggle by birth, Chloe Claventino may never have had any mastery of magic, but since meeting November it has saturated her to the very core. It has trapped her indefinately in her chamber where her every thought and desire pours itself out through her fingers and the harp they always clasp. Her eyes are fixed on the distant horizon beyond the windows of her chamber, and they never fall from it.  
  
The young Claventino oftens sits outside as he does now, listening to the sorrowful vibes of the music, hoping to catch a note of the music that might speak of her love for him. The time he spends there is unforgiving to him.  
  
He feels a hand on his shoulder, and turns stiffly to look over his shoulder. His brow unknits. He is glad to see his sister.  
  
Sarah Claventino smiles and draws back a fold of her sky blue cloak. One eye is shielded by a wing of her neck-length hair, gold straw. "Hello, blood of mine."  
  
He stands and embraces her. As she holds him against her, Sarah closes her eyes and speaks words stolen from her brother's lips. "It's been so long, and so hard. You left me here alone." Sarah opens her eyes and lifts his chin. "You are never alone. They may be lost, but they love you. Even if they do not know it themselves sometimes. We are of the same blood."  
  
His lower lip juts out as if in a sulk, and Sarah says, "Too long."  
  
Long seconds pass as the two stare at each other, resting their hands upon the other's shoulders. Then, Sarah sighs. "Come on, blood of mine. It is your turn to leave now."  
  
Sarah leads her brother through the winding halls of Claventino, telling him of her life beyond the walls of their ancestral home. The boy does not speak, because Sarah asks and answers his questions for him, just as he would have spoken them. And he learns his sister speaks too often of a certain muggle, and though her stories are biased through her eyes, he also learns how the world sees her falling further away from normal senses. She starts to run down the halls, and he follows her round every twisted corner and down every obscure passage.  
  
The pair plunge into foliage, a thick wall of creepers and vines choking this leg of the hall. Pushing through the clumps of heather and moss, they emerge in a dark grotto, the walls curved trunks of oak and root. Strange plants never beheld by wizard or muggle alike glow with inner luminosity, bathing corners in ghostly green and yellow light. The young boy looks around, intrigued. He has explored Claventino for many years, and never has he found this place.  
  
"Here you shall find the relics of our ancestors," Sarah whispers. "And not a little of them as well." She prances over to a large trunk buried into the centre of the grotto by thick roots, looking entirely undignified for a girl of nineteen. Whispering a cryptic phrase, she spits on a tangle of twigs and vines bundled in a hollow. They unfurl with a rustle of leaves a strange low cry, revealing a long ebony Wizard's Wand. Highlights in the wood are gorgeously rich violet or crimson, and the handle end is wrapped in a black sheath. Sarah plucks the wand from its nest and flings herself around, throwing the wand at her brother, who catches it deftly.   
  
"That," she says excitedly. "Is the wand of one of your great great grandfathers - bloodwood, with a core of centaur tail hairs." She giggles. "Not many wands with bits of centaur in them these days."   
  
Soon they are running back through the twisting, immortal maze. "Where are we going?" asks Sarah, glancing at her brother, whose eyes were fixed ahead. "Our front door. We have one of those you know."  
  
It is a grand door at that, carved of the same bloodwood trees as the archaic wand. It is a throwback to times before the Claventino madness, carved with celebrations of the wizard's intelligence and knowledge - there are maps of the stars, names of strange and wonderful potions, and extinct creatures of wonderous might and beauty.   
  
Sarah opens the door, and leads him out beyond the Claventino walls, over a glistening paved bridge. A hairy blue river troll leans upon a heavy brass club at the other end of the bridge, snoozing in the glorious sunlight. Certainly tamed and trained by a past Claventino, it is strangely adorned with the cloth effigy of a man, tied around its left arm and shoulder.  
  
The boy drinks in his surroundings with the dark maw of his eyes, never before having seen outside of his family's strange and demented world. The sun - for the first time he knew it was the real sun - is a powerful halo above the mountains. It hurts his eyes, and his sister has to gently pull his gaze from it and explain it is unsafe.  
  
"I have never been out here before," Sarah says. "But you have brother. It was when you were small, a babe in your mother's arm. Before the music enchanted her." She points down the bubbling river. "Further down is the place were you were stung by the swarm of Billywigs. In his anger, father wrought some hideous curses upon them. In doing so I think he broke the Ban on Experimental Breeding..."  
  
He follows her outstretched arm, but can see nothing. For a moment he becomes intensely aware of his feet barely brushing the ground, the weight of his body canted slightly backwards. He has grown up with this, and it troubles him for only a moment. Perhaps it would trouble him more once he was amongst other young wizards and witches, who did not share his twisted history.  
  
At that moment the pair hears footsteps on the paved path from behind them. Swinging around they see Athena Featherheart, the family servant, drawing a latched chest behind her. Enchanted, it floats a full inch above the ground. A large bird of woeful figure perches atop it, its brittle feathers dark navy, green and black.   
  
Sarah places an arm on her brother's shoulder. "Here are your things brother. All that you will need at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry." The bird, an Irish Phoenix (or Augurey) opened its beak and let loose a forlorn wail. Athena cringed and pawed at her ears, but the two Claventinos didn't flinch. As the Augurey flapped its wings and alighted on her brother's arm, Sarah sighed for him. "They won't let me take Sancho there. Not this year."  
  
The bird takes flight, heading back toward the massive bloodwood doorway of Claventino. When she is sure the bird was gone, Athena throws herself down on the grass at the young boy's feet and begin to whimper as a wronged lover. "Hear me, lord of my soul, master of my passion! You drive me to the brink of destruction with your ungrateful cold. A drop of blood from your finger to mine, is all I ask!"  
  
Sarah Claventinos draws herself up to her full height, full of indignation, and spits at her, "Away, silly wench! Cast thine eyes away from my blood and break thy charms upon another vessel!"  
  
This sight would appear most strange to an observer, for when one looked more closely at Athena Featherheart, it is as if a viel would fall from their eyes and they would see that she had the face of Sarah Claventinos. The likeness is no coincidence, but a product of the unwise enchantments that fell upon the servant, unwillingly swept along with the unsound whims of her masters. It is this strange charm that illicitates such fierce hatred between the two, though a greater part was the unnatural love Athena professed towards her young brother.  
  
Athena claws the grass and tries to catch a hold of the young boy's heel, but he pushes away and floats just out of her reach. "You murder my spirit!" she screams.  
  
Enraged, Sarah pulls her wand from inside her cloaks and stabs it toward the servant. "Expelliarmus!" The blast pitches Athena up from the ground and back down the path. As she writhes madly, Sarah speaks again, her voice raw with anger, but the words are cool and satin - they are her brother's words. "I am so sorry Athena. The curse on my family has worked its way into your mind as well, and one day I shall repay you for these wasted years. You need not a touch of my blood - it is a jinx not a blessing."  
  
The boy licks his lips once, and then forces open his mouth and tongue. "Let vose be veh last wurds yu speek fur me sista."   
  
Sarah takes his hand tentatively, and a shiver runs up her arm. She blinks slowly - something has fallen from her.  
  
After helping him drag the chest beyond the bridge and the river post of the river troll, Sarah shows him the tall rotted tree hollow enchanted to the floo network. She smiles as she hands over the bag of floo powder. "Good luck and safe passage, blood of mine."  
  
Hugh Claventino steps into the hollow trunk, opens the bag of floo powder and scoops up the dirty green dust. Sarah opens her mouth to speak the word, but he raises his hand and stops her. "No sista. I no vis wurd." Perhaps for the first time in years, he smiles. "Gud fortuwn, blud off myne."   
  
Then, he opens his fingers and flings the floo dust around his feet, and shouts.  
  
"HOG-WARTS!" 


End file.
